This smart, fanciful and brilliantly staged comedy takes a truly one-of-a-kind premise and makes it, of all things, a weirdly profound meditation on consciousness, identity, fame, gender and reality.

The most excitingly original movie of the year.

A wildly inventive, unrelenting thrill that amazes us with its visual and intellectual treats and dazzles us with its ongoing ingenuity.

Absolutely, see the movie.

Either Being John Malkovich gets nominated for best picture, or the members of the Academy need portals into their brains.

Breathlessly imaginative.

Being John Malkovich, which contains not a frame of extraneous footage, is more than a must-see movie: It's a must-see-more-than-once event.

Devilishly inventive and so far out there it's almost off the scale.

But then Being John Malkovich is a brilliant juggling act, too, brilliantly brought off.

It's the film we leave most movie theaters wishing we'd seen instead.

Smart people will relish its temerariousness, average people will smile awkwardly and comment that it's "kinda different," and dimly lit people may mistake it for the Elmo movie and drool quietly in the back rows. It's a movie for everyone.

Gloriously inventive, delightfully nutty comic treasure is unlike anything you've ever seen. It's lunatic.

If we're allowed just a couple of truly singular discoveries in twelve months, it's a good year; when one of them is a film as exhilarating as Spike Jonze's feature debut, it's a banner year.

Irresistable, nimble and very funny.